Since I’m not legally allowed to show the American Physical Society logo (they complained last time) this will have to do:

A GAGGLE IS NOT A CONSENSUS

You have recently received a letter from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), purporting to convey a “consensus” of the scientific community that immediate and drastic action is needed to avert a climatic catastrophe.

We do not seek to make the scientific arguments here (we did that in an earlier letter, sent a couple of months ago), but simply to note that the claim of consensus is fake, designed to stampede you into actions that will cripple our economy, and which you will regret for many years. There is no consensus, and even if there were, consensus is not the test of scientific validity. Theories that disagree with the facts are wrong, consensus or no.

We know of no evidence that any of the “leaders” of the scientific community who signed the letter to you ever asked their memberships for their opinions, before claiming to represent them on this important matter.

We also note that the American Physical Society (APS, and we are physicists) did not sign the letter, though the scientific issues at stake are fundamentally matters of applied physics. You can do physics without climatology, but you can’t do climatology without physics.

The APS is at this moment reviewing its stance on so-called global warming, having received a petition from its membership to do so. That petition was signed by 160 distinguished members and fellows of the Society, including one Nobelist and 12 members of the National Academies. Indeed a score of the signers are Members and Fellows of the AAAS, none of whom were consulted before the AAAS letter to you.

Regarding the National Policy Statement on Climate Change of the APS Council: An Open Letter to the Council of the American Physical Society

As physicists who are familiar with the science issues, and as current and past members of the American Physical Society, we the undersigned urge the Council to revise its current statement* on climate change as follows, so as to more accurately represent the current state of the science:

Greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, accompany human industrial and agricultural activity. While substantial concern has been expressed that emissions may cause significant climate change, measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today. In addition, there is an extensive scientific literature that examines beneficial effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide for both plants and animals.

Studies of a variety of natural processes, including ocean cycles and solar variability, indicate that they can account for variations in the Earth’s climate on the time scale of decades and centuries. Current climate models appear insufficiently reliable to properly account for natural and anthropogenic contributions to past climate change, much less project future climate.

The APS supports an objective scientific effort to understand the effects of all processes – natural and human –on the Earth’s climate and the biosphere’s response to climate change, and promotes technological options for meeting challenges of future climate changes, regardless of cause.

* The statement of the APS Council, adopted on November 18, 2007 is as follows:

“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.”

Gary J. Gerardi Professor, Department of Chemistry and Physics William Paterson University

Ivar Giaever Institute Professor, School of Engineering and School of Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Nobel Prize in Physics 1973 Member National Academy of Science, National Academy of Engineering; Fellow APS

George T. Gillies Research Professor, School of Engineering and Applied Science; and Research Professor, Department of Physics University of Virginia Clinical Professor, Department of Neurosurgery, Virginia Commonwealth University Fellow APS

Mike Gruntman Professor of Astronautics University of Southern California Author, Blazing the Trail. The Early History of Spacecraft and Rocketry (AIAA) Luigi G. Napolitano Book Award (International Academy of Astronautics) 2006 Member American Geophysical Union, Associate Fellow AIAA

George Hacken Senior Director, Safety-Critical Systems New York City Transit Authority Formerly Senior Member of the Technical Staff, GEC-Marconi Aerospace Chair, New York Chapter, IEEE Computer Society Member AMS, SIAM, ANS, AIAA, New York Academy of Sciences

Michael Monce Professor of Physics, Astronomy, and Geophysics Connecticut College Member AAPT, American Geophysical Union

Nasif Nahle Scientific Research Director Biology Cabinet, Mexico Member AAAS, New York Academy of Sciences

Rodney W. Nichols President and CEO, New York Academy of Sciences (1992-2001) Vice President and Executive Vice President, The Rockefeller University (1970-1990) Secretary of Defense Medal for Distinguished Meritorious Civilian Service (1970) Fellow AAAS, New York Academy of Sciences

Gordon C. Oehler Senior Fellow, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies Working Group Chairman, Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States. Corporate Vice President for Corporate Development, SAIC (1998-2004) National Intelligence Officer for Science, Technology and Proliferation (1989-1992)

William P. Oliver Professor of Physics Tufts University Life Member APS

Frank R. Paolini Adjunct Professor of Physics University of Connecticut at Stamford (retired) Senior Member APS, Member IEEE

William B. Walters Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Maryland John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (1986) ACS Award in Nuclear Chemistry (2001) Alexander von Humboldt Senior Fellow, University of Mainz (2002) Life Member APS, Member ACS

Sounds as if some scientists are objecting to their societies by inclusion signing their names by proxy with out empirical sampling. Hurray for them. About time the political end of societies devoted to science had to take a back seat to the scientific end of said societies.

I call these 160 physicists the “myth busters”, busting the myth of consensus. And not a moment too soon. Just look at this piece of jibberish from the Financial Times of all newspapers.

“Some of the sceptics may have scientific backgrounds but they are not in the mainstream of contemporary climate research. The real experts – hundreds of scientists worldwide who are examining the link between climate and carbon dioxide emissions – have no doubt that man-made global warming is a real crisis that must be addressed urgently.”

So, according to the FT, sceptics only have a “science background” away from mainstream climate research. Those who form the consensus, are, according to the FT, “real experts.” Thus Lindzen, Christy, Spencer, Pielke, Eschenbach et al merely have a science background, while Schmidt, Mann, Briffa et al count as real experts.

Yeah right. So now we can add 160 physicists to the sceptics list. I’ll just sit back and wait for the announcement to be read in this evenings news broadcast.

Remember all these physicists who know their science and know not to prostate it before politics/grants/money. Remember their institutions/organizations. Thanks to Anthony for the names of heroes for science. Now if people like Brian B would join forces with those named above, rather than quit, and demand the resignation of those who perverted, at the very least, climate science, then we might begin to see some sanity return to western societies and science.

Well, the very fact that this person appears
Dr. Roger Cohen, retired Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil
It just shows that it’s all funded by BIG OIL and thus is completely biased, unlike anything from The (Insert countryof choice) Government and can be ignored.
Not!

In case anyone is feeling cheated. (By the way, did you know that people are PIRATING
Holywood Movies by the Internet? 60 Minutes on Sunday. Horrors! The Holywood people are up in arms about it! But that’s a real concern of lost revenue. Not a “we just don’t like you” concern, as Anthony using the APS logo in a legitimate way.)

Do not tell my hubby but the Physicists (him) top the chemists (me) in scientific clout when it comes to AGW.

“You cannot do climatology without physics” is so true. The paper published in the International Journal of Modern Physics. By G. Gerlich, R. D. Tscheuschner made a lot of sense to my poor chemist’s mind.

If anyone ever says to me that chemists, or physicists (…or insert your empirically driven scientific discipline of choice here…) are not climatologists, I reply with, “no, they are REAL scientists. NOT political advocates. UNLIKE the entire IPCC.”

Indeed, but that does not stop many of them climatologists trying, does it?

Climatology is the only discipline in “science” that is entirely conclusion lead, ignores empirical evidence and relies on flawed computer simulations, errors and blatant lies to self-validate in the least scientific process I have ever witnessed of any organisation that claims to be scientific.

Political types eventually occupy major organization leadership roles, even if the organization is a scientific, medical or engineering society. By definition, political types are succeptable to political correctness and can be pressured into supporting politically correct “consensus”.

Perhaps my repeated sneering at the Climate Scientologists as “fifth rate physicists” has just been seconded. Though I suppose that someone will argue that they’re not incompetent, they’re just dishonest.

By going to the APS web site one can view the banned logo. To me the first impression is that it has a big ‘C’ as its main visual – that could represent “consensus”, but, maybe not. Maybe it is meant to show some reality of physics. If so what?

I suggest the APS give WUWT permission to put this logo to a posting and we’ll see if we can’t suggest some improvements.

While substantial concern has been expressed that emissions may cause significant climate change, measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today. In addition, there is an extensive scientific literature that examines beneficial effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide for both plants and animals.

Add these 162 signatories to the 32,000 odd listed in the NIPCC report published in June (if thy are not already in there) – see nipccreport.org – and we have an overwhelming concensus of scientists which should have blown the IPCC AGW view to kingdom come. Why hasn’t it already done so?

Well I am a member of the APS via the Optical Society of America (one of the founding groups), and also of the AAAS; and neither one of those organisations has ever contacted me and asked me for even an opinion let alone any rationale for having an opinion.

The AAAS constantly sends me “Alerts” which essentially outline “their” position, and what “important” legislation is in the works; presumably with the idea that I shoulkd support that.

Well if “the science is settled”, the only legislation I am intereted in re climate; is to now defund any future climate research; and start funding the engineering that will be needed (they say) to develop alternatives in the way of energy.

Perhaps you climate “researchers” in academia should redirect your careers into engineering; with a lean towards energy engineering; which would be the biggest stumbling block towards a more livable future for all humanity.

Just my opinion of course; I’m not interested in influencing legislators (not my privilege); but I am happy to try and educate them.

Wow, a lot of impressive heavyweights in that list. I’m impressed with the number of those scientists who having now retired from those institutions; where speaking out of the party line could be terminal; have now come out from under the bushel, and spoken their mind.

Too bad that it is Academia, where freedom of speech is reputedly sacrosanct; that actually has the most repressive censorship.

I’m glad I got out of academia early to work in situations where my efforts could actually make a difference to the well-being of people everywhere.

This comes nicely in the wake of my telling Tom Fuller’s survey that the stifling of debate was “worse than expected” “unprecedented” etc.

And I hear that the bad era of Connolley as Wiki admin has finally ended… so when you now want to express your frustration with bad science, you can help directly with reinstating Wikipedia entries to something resembling balance again…

Is the Iraqi information minister now working for the American Physical Society?
Last time while he talked US army tanks were crossing the screen just back of him!, now it seems the same is happening. :-)
The deniers’ cavalry is coming!

The APS has 46,000 members ( http://aps.org/about/history/index.cfm or maybe more since I am not sure how up-to-date that number is). So, the 162 members who signed this statement represent ~0.35% of the membership.

blockquote>
We also note that the American Physical Society (APS, and we are physicists) did not sign the letter, though the scientific issues at stake are fundamentally matters of applied physics. You can do physics without climatology, but you can’t do climatology without physics.

The APS has a standing statement on climate change still in effect that is very clear on the subject. As the authors of this piece note, it is currently under review, which may be the reason why the APS chose not to sign at this time…i.e., that it was simply bad timing. Or, maybe they weren’t asked to sign or weren’t able to respond in time. Who knows.

Gail Combs says:

The paper published in the International Journal of Modern Physics. By G. Gerlich, R. D. Tscheuschner made a lot of sense to my poor chemist’s mind.

To this physicist, it was perhaps the most embarrassing paper ever to find its way into any peer-reviewed physics journal. The basic flaw in the logic behind one of its major claims, that the atmospheric greenhouse effect violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, can be illustrated by a simple problem that one could give to first-year physics students once you have introduced the subject of heat transfer via radiation.

Well if “the science is settled”, the only legislation I am intereted in re climate; is to now defund any future climate research; and start funding the engineering that will be needed (they say) to develop alternatives in the way of energy.

That is a big strawman that you have erected. Nobody in the know claims that there are not still significant uncertainties regarding climate change. However, just because there are many aspects that scientists are trying to understand better does not mean that they don’t understand anything…and, in particular, understand enough to be able to say with quite a bit of confidence that, “Houston, we have a problem!”

IMO, the APS has been cowardly in their foot dragging to correct their view of AGW. For more than a year now they have claimed to be studying the AGW issue with an eye to amending their statement. Given the high number of prominent members who have asked for a change in language and the APS pubs editor’s claim to re-examine the issue, it is time for honest leadership. And willingness to admit error.

But the whole exercise is so deeply jaded by misanthropic prejudice that some of us no longer expect anything of substance. It has been one long, tedious study in the failures of artificial intelligence, re-education and computer “modeling.” Each day that continues the farce of blaming human beings for global warming – is a triumph for shameful hubris of the “enlightened.”

Joel Shore (11:24:17) :
“The APS has 46,000 members ( http://aps.org/about/history/index.cfm or maybe more since I am not sure how up-to-date that number is). So, the 162 members who signed this statement represent ~0.35% of the membership.”

If you look at the roster, you see a good number of college professors and chairs (and retirees and emeritus).

In light of the current anti-scientific climate and the extreme orthodoxy of the AGW church that controls the modern science world like a gigantic suffocating octopus…the older (and often retired) physicists are not in fear of their jobs or research funding…as much as the younger ones are.

The younger ones have to keep bread on the table for the family…so many of them dare not speak against the great Oz.

“I solemnly tell you, there are absolutely no icebergs in the arctic. All such reports are lies by the infidel Bush. And if any icebergs do appear, I assure you we will meet them at the gates with shoes and CO2.”

Morano (Climatedepot.com) has recently linked the following NOAA/NWS lesson post which is most amazing in stating “…there is no evidence that it (CO2) is causing an increase in global temperatures.”. It may be quite a novelty to catch this lesson before it is dropped. I can’t imagine NOAA leaving it up very much longer:

“It has been thought that an increase in carbon dioxide will lead to global warming. While carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing over the past 100 years, there is no evidence that it is causing an increase in global temperatures.

In 1997, NASA reported global temperature measurements of the Earth’s lower atmosphere obtained from satellites revealed no definitive warming trend over the past two decades. In fact, the trend appeared to be a decrease in actual temperature. In 2007, NASA data showed that one-half of the ten warmest years occurred in the 1930’s with 1934 (tied with 2006) as the warmest years on record. (NASA data October 23, 2007 from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt)

The 1930s through the 1950s were clearly warmer than the 1960s and 1970s. If carbon dioxide had been the cause then the warmest years would have understandably been in the most recent years. But that is not the case.

The largest differences in the satellite temperature data were not from any man-made activity, but from natural phenomena such as large volcanic eruptions from Mt. Pinatubo, and from El Niño.

The behavior of the atmosphere is extremely complex. Therefore, discovering the validity of global warming is complex as well. How much effect will the increase in carbon dioxide will have is unclear or even if we recognize the effects of any increase.”

Note for those APS members who do not like being “represented” in things without your consent. Nov. 8 will be the review of the APS politicized position on GW. Those leading the petition have requested the rank and file members to email or otherwise contact the APS councilors and officers to express their view on the subject.

those 160 names represent a who’s who of outstanding members who are opposed to this sort of political bunk going on in a professional organization. It is not the sum total of members opposed to such things but rather a prestigious sampling of those who do not like being used as pawns in a game of politics.

Those responsible for the original pro AGW letter without even polling the membership should be removed from office as they have misused that office and confidence placed in them. While that wont happen, it is another travesty that it has not.

The internal politics of such an organization is something that few members have any concern over for the most part. It’s usually left to the politically interested parties (the usual suspects) who in general spend their time mouthing off about the importance of diversity and try to contrive ways to end the inequity caused by unrelated circumstances – usually without doing any serious damage to budgets or to the organization (or to society) so members are content to let them play their little games and to just ignore them.

My mum bought me James Gleick’s ‘Genius’ biography of Feynman when I was a teenager and it made me become a physicist. DISREGARD was the best phrase and ‘You’re only as good as your last experiment’. I still use them today. It’s amazing how many people get carried away with too simplistic ideas.

Leif Svalgaard (08:40:22) It should be pointed out that the American Association for the Advancement of Science letter to the AGU did not specify CO2. They state as follows:
“Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is
occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the
greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.”

I am still waiting for proof that any greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of global temperature increases.

If…mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in
the Earth’s physical and ecological systems[like water scarcity created by gov’t rationing],
social systems,
security and
human health are likely to occur.”

The truth was buried in there, but I found it!

“Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.” –Ronaldus Maximus

Therefore, discovering the validity of global warming is complex as well

It’s complex, all right. It’s so complex it has yet to be discovered.
You have a hypothesis that has failed to replace the null hypothesis to any confidence level. The proof is as thin as the trace gas upon which it was inflated.
If AGW were candy, it would be hypothetical M&M’s. They vaporize into thin air as soon as the bag is opened. After a while, you get tired of spending your time & money examining empty bags of candy. The world can ill afford to invest in such vaporous returns that AGW has produced.

But how can that experiment be relevant to the impact of increases in CO2? Would not Boyle’s law ensure that the temperature went up simply by adding the seltzer tablets? (P.S. It is 40 + years since I did such calculations for O and A-levels, so my apologies if I misremembered.)

I agree.
Climate science is mostly not that complicated and any good scientist with a solid general background can understand the principles involved, interpret data and graphs, and see that the “climate science” of the alarmists does not have any defendable science to speak of. When you get into the energy flux and balances, the math gets a bit dicey, but most of it concerns fairly basic aspects of the sciences. It is only those who do not want others to look too closely at the science who want to pretend that it is above the heads of all but “their climate scientists.”

George E. Smith:
Well if “the science is settled”, the only legislation I am intereted in re climate; is to now defund any future climate research; and start funding the engineering that will be needed (they say) to develop alternatives in the way of energy.

That is a big strawman that you have erected. Nobody in the know claims that there are not still significant uncertainties regarding climate change. However, just because there are many aspects that scientists are trying to understand better does not mean that they don’t understand anything…and, in particular, understand enough to be able to say with quite a bit of confidence that, “Houston, we have a problem!”

Actually if you’re pretty sure CO2 is the problem, then it is more important to find engineering solutions than it is to figure out the particulars of whether hurricanes will increase 50% or 80%. All you really need to know is that you’re heading for rapid changes, so how do you cope with that? How do you harden your infrastructure? How do you cope with population movements? These are enormous questions. There is only one thing anybody needs to know about climate, and that’s that it can suddenly change. That’s really the end of the story as far as anyone concerned with anything practical is concerned.

There is no straw man. Mr Smith is right. The priority is technologies for coping and adapting. Climatology at this point is pretty much just academic.

It is the same with a rock from space. We know it could happen. The question isn’t when, the question is how could we cope.

The fact that there remain uncertainties will always be of interest to scientists and academic, the people who study for the love of knowledge.

But the money needs to go where it is needed most. And right now that’s practical technologies.

I know it sounds like I’m anti-AGW, and I’m just seizing on this as a convenient argument to dismiss the field, but actually I found myself far more in line with Mr Black Swan, who describes himself as an uber-green, simply because he thinks we vastly underestimate our vulnerability to unpredictable events, and therefore we need to build resiliency, backups, technologies for adapting to whatever comes, because chances are, we won’t see it coming anyway.

I mean, I will not be surprised if in 5 years they discover that CO2 was never a problem, but in the meantime something else we did was actually the cause of massive climate change. So how do you prepare for that? You start preparing anyway, in whatever ways you can.

That is the real danger of “settled” science—the overconfidence draws your attention away from the Black Swans.

I have a colleague at Harvard who advises the National Academy of Sciences on certain issues. She tells me that following the transmogrification of the Mann hockey stick into a badminton racquet, skepticism abounds now at the NAS. If the the APS holds an opposite option to the NAS, I’d guess there is no consensus whatsoever.

“The APS has 46,000 members ( http://aps.org/about/history/index.cfm or maybe more since I am not sure how up-to-date that number is). So, the 162 members who signed this statement represent ~0.35% of the membership.”
—-
“The APS has a standing statement on climate change still in effect that is very clear on the subject.”

Since the APS allegedly didn’t poll the opinion of a single member before issuing the standing statement on climate change still in effect, maybe you can do us the favor Joel of calculating the percentage of membership who signed that statement?

I quit the APS in the mid 1990s over their trying to patch things up with the post-modern literary folks via the Sokal affair. They have only become more “political” in the meanwhile. I quit the AAAS a year ago. I couldn’t stand the political drift of the organization under John Holdren and Don Kennedy as Editor of Science.

Someone earlier on this post had it right. The “political types” will work tirelessly to gain control of any organization. And there is little point in trying to work from within. The best tactic is to develop alterative scientific organizations.

“Joel Shore (11:24:17) :
The APS has 46,000 members ( http://aps.org/about/history/index.cfm or maybe more since I am not sure how up-to-date that number is). So, the 162 members who signed this statement represent ~0.35% of the membership”

Well, that is a very unsceintific representation of the situation.

How many physicist (NOT their representivie bodies) have recently signed a letter saying that catastrophic AGW is real & we must act now?

Perhaps members could tell the APS (and others) that you have earmarked your subscriptions as the funds you will use for your cost of carbon credits (or similar scheme). You will therefore alert them to their own sacrifice in “saving the planet”, and will be able to carry out a cost-benefit analaysis of their next political intervention on the subject.

Ain’t gonna work George. They’ll spend years and immense amount of money using sophisticated computer models to demonstrate the operation of a machine based on the principle of heat amplification by positive feedback. Only to familiarise themselves with the law of conservation of energy when they turn the ignition.

savethesharks (12:16:35) :
“The younger ones have to keep bread on the table for the family…so many of them dare not speak against the great Oz.”

True, but what all publicly-funded scientists should realise is that while the gravy train is running at full tilt now, should any climate agreement stifle the economic well-being of the developed nations, their funding will be among the first to suffer. Look no further than the 25% cut at the UK Met Office.

Early on in my scientific career I was told that when the error bars of 2 independent measurements, or an independent measure, and a prediction of a model overlapped, then then the results were consistent, and the prediction agreed with the measurement. This is not quite true. I’ll illustrate this idea with two examples from the opposite ends of the spectrum. The second law of thermodynamics, and the famous or infamous Drake Equation(First SETI Conference on the scientific search for extraterrestials). The predictions of the 2nd law of therm, has not seen any experimental challenges to it with millions or maybe billions of experiments. The error bars are very narrow, and they overlap. , The second law is cast in concrete. On the other hand,the Drake equation can have any value from “billions, and billions” to zero. The error bars are GIGANTIC, so of course they overlap(or to quote Michael Crichton “An expression that could mean anything, means nothing”). The problem with climate science today is both the models (i.e General Circulaton Models(GCMs+ add ons), and the Experimental data have large error bars, which has not really been addresses adequately by the climate alarmist. The coupling, and the boundary conditons of these models require adjustible parameters( rudely called “fudge factors”, or in polite society as physical data with a lot of “wiggleworm”–Freeman Dyson) . One example is the effect of clouds, on radiative feedback, but there are other fudge factors which can effect the projections of the models.

Watts, and McIntire have shed an enormous spotlight on significant problems with the experimental data of Climate Science, and for that reason they should be elevated to the status of scientific heroes.

As a retired scientist and engineer, I think that the political wing of the alamist community has elevated climate science to the level of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. If the science is “settled”, then all research monies should be zeroed out, and the monies should be spent on mitigation. If the Science is not settled, then there should be continued money spent of research, to narrow the error bars.

I can recall that Fred Seitz, past president of the National Academy, head of Rockefellow University, who is considered the Father of the Skeptic wing, ennuciated the statement, about reducing the size of the error bars, and actively pursuing this point of view, triggered a violent reaction(lunch mob) from the alarmist community. The political wing (e.g. Greenpiece[exxonWatch], DeSmog Blog, Bob Park(Voodoo Science Fame), launched a vicious “Ad Hominen” campaign against him

Well if “the science is settled”, the only legislation I am intereted in re climate; is to now defund any future climate research; and start funding the engineering that will be needed (they say) to develop alternatives in the way of energy.

That is a big strawman that you have erected. Nobody in the know claims that there are not still significant uncertainties regarding climate change. “””

‘Twas not I who erected the strawman Joel; maybe AlGore, and his expert science advisor Dr.James Hansen. They are the ones who have been trumpeting that the science is settled and that disagreement with that is “unacceptible” and should lead to bad consequences for any dissenter.

And I’m certainly not the originator of the notion that government funding shoulkd switch from climate research to alternative energy solitions.

I’m not in favor of any government funding of either of those things; there’s no Constitutional authority for that.

Sorry if that Gores your ox Joel; I know that swilling at the taxpayer’s trough must be fun; but this taxpayer would rather fund what the Constitution tells them to fund; not what they think will buy them votes.

I am not against funding of climate research; there are lots of people with big money who have vested interests in knowing what either weather or climate changes are going to mean for their future; including their economic future.

So there are plenty who are willing and able to continue to support “climate scientists”.

It is just taxpayer funding that I believe is a misuse of public funds. I have a friend who is a metorologist; who makes relatively long range weather forecasts (longer than a week say; ) and he gets paid good money to be correct in his forecasts; by people who have a huge investment in the outcome.

I once worked in an industry blue sky lab environment; although our particular group had a charter to develop real hardware immediately; but I got to observe research solid state physicists, and materials scientists in action; and as soon as they started to run into the real practical difficulties of the material system they were studying (this happened to be LED materials research); instead of working on the far more difficult practical problems of the technology; they just wanted to move on to a new material; and be the first to publish on that material; even if what they published turned out to be hay that had already been once through the horse.

Subsequently, I was able to join with a small band of practical entrepeneurs; to take one of those sidelined materials technologies, and make a real company around it; that brought products to the market, long before any of those fancy materials showed any promise.
Even today, I still get kudos for doing that, from some clever people who were at Bell Telephone laboratories working on the material that never made it; and also from some very astute academia researchers who pioneered the material that we were able to turn into a technology.

It’s all obsolete today; but I believe we can point to the difference we made in getting to where that technology is today.

“…the 162 members who signed this statement represent ~0.35% of the membership.”

OK. Then using Joel Shore’s own ‘logic’, at least eleven posters here out of 67 disagreed with Joel. Not one agrees. That represents around 16% of the comments.

But wait, it gets better. Out of the 26 comments following Shore’s, 11 disagreed. Now we’re over 40% who disagree with Joel Shore.

But I can make it even better. The three posts immediately following Shore’s comment don’t agree with Joel Shore. That means that Joel is only at 25%. The other 75% is the consensus [at that point in time, of course; I’m just using alarmist tactics here].

But as Einstein replied to the one hundred scientists who signed a letter disputing relativity, ”To defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one fact.” All it takes is one fact to deconstruct the CO2=AGW conjecture. The number of scientists doesn’t matter.

To dispute CO2=AGW, here’s a fact: despite a [97% natural] increase in CO2, the current climate is well within its natural, long-term parameters. Nothing unusual is occurring. Not a thing. The climate is actually quite benign, despite the red faced, spittle flecked arm-waving of the AGW crowd.

I might add that it is not the duty of scientific skeptics to prove anything. We’re skeptical, see? We question — and we’re not getting honest answers.

The climate alarmists are the ones who have the burden of convincing us that CO2 will cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe, as they have repeatedly predicted. But they are not even capable of falsifying the theory of natural climate variability. And they deviously hide their raw data and methodologies, asking everyone to — get this — trust them.

What happened in the APS is simple: the organization has been hijacked by activists with an agenda. All it takes are one or two who know what they’re doing, as Prof Lindzen has explained.

If the APS wanted the honest opinion of its membership, they would simply invite some members known to be skeptical of AGW to help design a secret ballot poll, and ask the rank-and-file membership what it thinks. But they don’t.

The fact that they deliberately ignore their membership’s opinion means that they know damned well that the members won’t agree with their position; the number of signers who disputed the APS position is far greater than the APS executive board that approved its propaganda letter in the name of the organization.

When organizations have to resort to shenanigans like this, it shows that the truth is not in them.

I am always amazed that scientists who demand sound theory and verifiable data to support their positions (correctly) while rejecting unverifiable model results will accept on faith the unsupported word of economists (or politicians) based on no more than dubious modelling results, without even checking the assumptions underlying the models. There is no more reason to believe that global warming mitigation efforts will “destroy our economy”, than to believe in the potential for catastrophic AGW. Most of the readers of this blog make the same leap of economic faith that they refuse to make for scientific faith, but for many of them it is less surprising as there is some probability that, atv least for the less scientific among them, their disbelief in AGW is also, at least in part, faith based. I am an AGW denier also, although an east coast liberal intellectual denier (y’all didn’t know that such a creature could exist, did you?), but I also have a great deal of experience in energy efficiency, rather less in renewable energy, and more than a little in CO2 mitigation. We can only reduce our CO2 footprint by reducing the use of fossil fuel energy, and almost everything we can do toward that goal will have economic benefit. Economic models that say otherwise are developed without knowledge of the real world of energy on the part of the modellers, and the ones that I have reviewed are based on 2 totally invalid assumptions. Addressing CO2 to the benefit of our energy future is doing the right thing for the wrong reason, but is much better than doing nothing.

Back2Bat – it has been economically feasible for at least a decade, even based on current practises that externalize much of the cost of fossil fuels. If the fuels had to support their real costs, alternatives would blow them away. Try factoring in the USA military cost of keeping oil flowing from the middle-east and see what a gallon of gasoline would cost, or make the West Virginia coal miners pay for the societal and environmental costs of mountain top removal. Many, many efficiencies can be implemented for about 20% to 60% of the cost of the fossil fuel electricity they would avoid. They don’t get addressed for a large number of societal and industrial reasons, but mainly because energy is still a very small part of GDP and is only on the radar screen when something happens like gasoline at $4.00/gal. As with the economic modellers, you probably have no idea of the realities you allude to. Murray

The evidence is incintrovertible, but apparently so muddied that they can’t make an accurate prediction. I am sorry, but in simple engineering-land where I was brought up, if evidence is clear cut then it is just a matter of figuring out the right model/theory/relationship/equation/thingamajig to fit to your “incintrovertible” evidence to and then apply it to get the right answers.

I am always amazed that scientists who demand sound theory and verifiable data to support their positions (correctly) while rejecting unverifiable model results will accept on faith the unsupported word of economists (or politicians) based on no more than dubious modelling results, without even checking the assumptions underlying the models. There is no more reason to believe that global warming mitigation efforts will “destroy our economy”, than to believe in the potential for catastrophic AGW.

Actually, it is much worse than you have even portrayed it here. For one thing, I would say that there is in fact much more reason to believe climate models, based on physical principles, than to believe economics models.

However, more importantly, it is not as if most economists who have done modeling are claiming that global warming mitigation efforts will “destroy our economy”. In fact, most…at least that have made it to the peer-reviewed literature…are claiming quite the opposite. The claims about destroying the economy are, for the most part, not based on any modeling whatsoever; they are simply based on fear-mongering with no intellectual support of any kind.

Back2Bat says:

Wrong. As it becomes economically feasible to switch from fossil fuels that is when it should be done. Where did you learn economics?

Well, perhaps he learned it from a place that goes beyond the ideal market model and actually teaches one the simple concept of “externalities” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality ) or “tragedy of the commons”, which I imagine would be pretty much all universities these days. May I ask where you learned economics?

What happened in the APS is simple: the organization has been hijacked by activists with an agenda. All it takes are one or two who know what they’re doing, as Prof Lindzen has explained.

If all you folks think that these organizations like the APS, ACS, AGU, AAAS, NAS, etc., etc. have all been hijacked by a small minority, then it ought to be a cinch to launch revolts in these organizations that would actually lead to the election of people to the Boards and Councils of these societies that would turn the direction around. It is a wonder that this hasn’t happened…unless one posits that in fact a significant majority of the membership actually agrees with the Boards and Councils of these organizations.

“They don’t get addressed for a large number of societal and industrial reasons, but mainly because energy is still a very small part of GDP and is only on the radar screen when something happens like gasoline at $4.00/gal.”

but a US gallon of petrol has an energetic content of about 35kWh. This average fit guy working might do 200W output continuous? Say a nine hour day (keeps the numbers easy!)? so 1800Wh? = 1.8kWh? So 1 gallon gasoline is 20 days of work? 1 months labour for $4? Ok lets cut it down to allow for conversion losses – 25% net? Call it a working week? So I’d say it’s a pretty large contributor to GDP. Good reason to find alternatives IMO. (Please check the numbers – OTTOMH)

Pray tell Joel, what are the externalities of burning carbon? CO2? Where is the tragedy? It will take energy to move to other energy forms. The Gulf Of Mexico alone has a 2000 year supply of energy for the US in the form of Methyl-hydrate.

Solar looks like it will work but windmills look like pure foolishness.

I think the chief “externality” is some folks don’t like progress. But that is a flaw of the underlying banking and money model, not the free market which we haven’t had since 1913.

‘Representatives from Baha’ism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism, Sikhism and Taoism will unveil programmes that “could motivate the largest civil society movement the world has ever seen,” said UN Assistant Secretary General Olav Kjorven.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon will launch the event under the banner “Faith Commitments for a Living Planet.”

…

Global warming and its impacts cannot be looked at just as a material problem. The root causes are spiritual,” agreed Stuart Scott, whose Interfaith Declaration on Climate Change — calling for the “stewardship and reverence for creation” — has been endorsed by dozens of major religious organisations.
…
“Religions cross boundaries and don’t have to deal with issues of finance, of sovereignty, of intellectual property on technology” — all issues bedeviling UN climate talks, said Jessica Haller, director of the Jewish Climate Campaign.

American environmentalist Bill McKibben, the founder of grassroots climate group 350.org, has identified two wellsprings for the worldwide tsunami of support for his Web-based cause: educated youth and faith-based groups.

Back2Bat – it has been economically feasible for at least a decade, even based on current practises that externalize much of the cost of fossil fuels. If the fuels had to support their real costs, alternatives would blow them away. Try factoring in the USA military cost of keeping oil flowing from the middle-east and see what a gallon of gasoline would cost, or make the West Virginia coal miners pay for the societal and environmental costs of mountain top removal. Many, many efficiencies can be implemented for about 20% to 60% of the cost of the fossil fuel electricity they would avoid. They don’t get addressed for a large number of societal and industrial reasons, but mainly because energy is still a very small part of GDP and is only on the radar screen when something happens like gasoline at $4.00/gal. As with the economic modellers, you probably have no idea of the realities you allude to. Murray “””

Well actually Murray; that stuff is already factored in.; and as for factoring in the cost of the military; that is the first thing that the Congress is authorised to lay and collect taxes to pay for; well unless you include paying the debts of the USA. Come to think of it, it is about the only thing Congress is authorised to colelct taxes for (besides paying the debts) Well and they ahve to provide for the general welfar of “The United States”, that beurocracy that lives in Washington DC.

One thing is for certain; the present energy system got to where it is by hoisting itself by its own bootstraps. You see there wasn’t ANY alternative sources to tax to pay for what we have now.

Certainly the free clean green renewable energy we started with wasn’t able to grow the human population to its present size; and it isn’t likely to sustain it; the renewal rate is just too damn slow, and it is too diffuse to collect.

Those fellows in the latest Scientific American who want to replace ALL energy for ALL purposes with clean green free renewables, with wind solar water (actually all of those are solar); say their grandiose scheme only requires the use of 1% of the earth’s land area. That is about how much of the present earth land are that we use today for everything for everybody on earth. Good luck on that; so how many years at the prevailing energy availability rates did it take us to create all of that infra-structure we now have ?

Well they propose to do it by 2030. Hey the earth doesn’t have enough resources available besides what is in use now; to actually do all that work in 21 years of continuous round the clock work by everyone available (and not doing something else).

“”” But as Einstein replied to the one hundred scientists who signed a letter disputing relativity, ”To defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one fact.” All it takes is one fact to deconstruct the CO2=AGW conjecture. The number of scientists doesn’t matter. “””

Can you point us to a copy of that letter Joel; I’m sure people would like to see such a historic document; as well as learn the names of those 100 scientists; who bet against Einstein’s relativity.

Was that the special theory or the general theory that they wrote against ?

Joel Shore “If all you folks think that these organizations like the APS, ACS, AGU, AAAS, NAS, etc., etc. have all been hijacked by a small minority, then it ought to be a cinch to launch revolts in these organizations that would actually lead to the election of people to the Boards and Councils of these societies that would turn the direction around.”

The behemoth is fed by power-hungry “Inquisitionesqe” narcissistic henchmen of the likes of Gore and his money-hungry greasy fingers and paranoid scientists-turned activists like Hansen.

Remember that mass delusions have occurred down through history, and no one knows why even the smartest of our species are duped…but it has happened many a time in the past…

…and it is happening before our eyes today.

Joel Shore: “It is a wonder that this [revolt] hasn’t happened…unless one posits that in fact a significant majority of the membership actually agrees with the Boards and Councils of these organizations.”

I’ll bet if you polled the “significant majority” and they would tell you privately something different than what they would say publicly…

…because they….have to keep bread on the table for the family.

The Skeptic-AGW scientific conference which is held in March every year (can’t think of the name of it)…was wrongly (and disrespectfully) criticized of about having a bunch of “old guys.”

I remember hearing that criticism and got a good laugh.

A couple of reasons why the “old guys” are the ones making a lot of noise:

1) They are tenured or retired so they needn’t fear for their job as much.

2) They have been on this planet twice or three times as long as the rest of us and are probably wiser….and see RIGHT THROUGH the monumental b***s*** of the AGW Church.

“There is no more reason to believe that global warming mitigation efforts will ‘destroy our economy’, than to believe in the potential for catastrophic AGW.”

You’re no doubt speaking of CO2 mitigation, by which you probably mean “carbon” sequestration. And it’s true that such a completely misguided and wasted effort probably wouldn’t destroy the economy.

It would have the same effect, and be just as productive, to hire several million people to dig 10’X10’X10′ holes with picks and shovels in empty fields, and then move the holes every three weeks. That would at least promote a healthier population.

Reducing CO2, on the other hand, would be harmful. Carbon dioxide is entirely beneficial. It is as necessary to life on Earth as H2O. More of the trace gas CO2 is better, because the atmosphere is currently starved of it. Increased CO2 would certainly improve agricultural yields. And CO2 is completely harmless in the trace gas amounts current and projected.

The canard that the tiny trace gas CO2 will cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe has been repeatedly discredited to the point that the alarmist crowd hesitates to make the claim any more.

There is no empirical evidence supporting that wild-eyed runaway global warming conjecture. And since CO2 will not cause runaway global warming, then it’s time to stop shoveling more money at that non-problem. The 160 scientists who signed the letter don’t swallow the CO2 alarmism; why should we?

All the ‘evidence’ that CO2 will cause runaway global warming comes from computer climate models. But models are not evidence. Data — raw data — is evidence. And the empirical evidence does not support the CO2=AGW runaway global warming conjecture.

Joel Shore can not understand how professional organizations can be easily co-opted to promote repeatedly falsified ideas like runaway global warming.

But many others may be interested in Prof Richard Lindzen’s damning report on the political shenanigans within organizations like the APS. Keep in mind that Prof Lindzen is speaking from personal, first hand experience: click

It should also be kept in mind that 160 esteemed scientists [in addition to the 31,000+ scientists who have signed the OISM Petition] have taken the extraordinary step of speaking out regarding the problem that Shore desperately attempts to denigrate for his own agenda. But those scientists didn’t sign their names on a whim. They signed because they see a major credibility problem brewing in the science community.

The current small clique of hucksters who have hijacked the climate peer review process are a little different from the peer review types who were bamboozled by the Sokal paper [which was refereed, vetted, approved and published in a peer reviewed journal], because the current climate clique is in it for their personal rent-seeking advantage, with their snouts buried deep in the public trough.

I provided that quote, not Joel. If you search the specific quote [in quotation marks], you’ll get plenty of hits. Here’s the first one, from the Encyclopedia Britannica: click. Here’s another, with the exact quote [under “Coming to America”]: click

“As with the economic modellers, you probably have no idea of the realities you allude to. ” Murray

I realize that the world is in the grip of insane Keynesian economic theory. Here is a rule of thumb for you:

1. Government is force.
2. Good ideas do not have to be forced on others.
3. Bad ideas should not be forced on others
4. Liberty is necessary for the difference between good ideas and bad ideas to be revealed.

You could pay a $100,000 for an econ education and never learn the above.

Good to see a few scientists sticking to principles objecting to political science. Scientists are going to start to wake up and realize the politicians will “blame” science for any outcome. If AGW does not work out as Al says, Al will simply claim he meant well but was mislead by bad scientists. You can not blame a politician, because “his intent was pure”. “How was he to know that scientists were lying to him”? “How was he to know the scientists were exaggerating their claims”? Scientists need to stick to scientific principles and stop playing politics.

But many others may be interested in Prof Richard Lindzen’s damning report on the political shenanigans within organizations like the APS. Keep in mind that Prof Lindzen is speaking from personal, first hand experience: click

Ah yes, and Lindzen can rely on the gullible to dutifully believe that basically every single scientific organization on the planet has been taken over by some small cadre of scientists that don’t represent their members!

savethesharks says:

A couple of reasons why the “old guys” are the ones making a lot of noise:

1) They are tenured or retired so they needn’t fear for their job as much.

2) They have been on this planet twice or three times as long as the rest of us and are probably wiser….and see RIGHT THROUGH the monumental b***s*** of the AGW Church.

(1) The majority of professors probably get tenure before they are 40. (It is typically about 6 years after they start in a tenure-track position.) And, how is it exactly that some minority of scientists are tyrannically demanding that their fellow scientists swear allegiance to “the AGW Church” that you speak of? You guys have this weird persecution complex, although I suppose it isn’t much different than these folks have: http://www.expelledthemovie.com/

(2) Some older people use that time to acquire further wisdom. Others don’t keep up with the times or current scientific understanding and tend to ossify in their beliefs.

Why yes Joel. I note that it seems that it is mostly younger highly educated people who die in sweat lodges, kill themselves waiting for aliens riding on comets, and are packing their bags for a Y12 trip to Mayan ruins. Think I will ossify.

Joel, it’s kids like you brought up in a multiple choice education system that have no idea about critical thinking. You’ve been taught to have faith in your teachers, not to understand them. Unfortunately by the faith you give is the faith you demand, you expect “trust me, I’m a physicist” to hold water.
I, too, read physics but my ideas stand on their own merit, not my robes.
You may have letters after your name calling you a ‘scientist’ but you talk like a priest.

No persecution complex at all. (I suppose you can call it that emotionally from your perspective).

But it is just plain fact.

Which leads me to another question to you, Joel.

What are you trying to prove?? What is your agenda?

You seem to get sidetracked on this alot and forget about talking about science. You end up defending your religion.

Throw the scientific method out the door, you might as well.

Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

[REPLY – Hmm. Offhand, I’d say Joel just disagrees with us skeptics. And, as he does so with considerably less venom than I find to be typical, that’s okay by me. He is somewhat embattled in this venue and I can respect someone who fights it out in what, in the main, must be considered “hostile territory” (despite the fact that we welcome both sides of the debate). The science is still in its infancy and there is a lot of room for error by any/all sides. ~ Evan]

THAT’S why they don’t keep up with the times….becasue sometimes the TIMES are just plain WRONG.

Pamela may I join you in the glorious ossification…..ah sweet bliss of truth.

Better to be an assified (oh sorry) ossified person in the RIGHT than a naive, green, mislead barking up the wrong tree in the wrong **cking part of the forest, drunk on too much CO2 for your own good.

You choose. But think while you are doing it. What am I trying to prove?? What am I trying to save from the dumps. What am i trying to repair in this very failed argument of mine.

Meanwhile—real scientific experimentation does not get done becauase finite humans are locked in their egos.

To this physicist, it was perhaps the most embarrassing paper ever to find
its way into any peer-reviewed physics journal. The basic flaw in the logic behind one of its major claims, that the atmospheric greenhouse effect violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, can be illustrated by a simple problem that one could give to first-year physics students once you have introduced the subject of heat transfer via radiation.

Several here seem to think the horrific effects of constraining CO2 emissions are only indicated by model studies. No, the effects are demonstrated by real world experience.

Reducing the emissions would reduce fossil fuel usage with resulting economic damage. This would be worse than the ‘oil crisis’ of the 1970s because the reduction would be greater, would be permanent, and energy use has increased since then. The economic disruption would be world-wide. Major effects would be in the developed world because it has the largest economies. Worst effects would be on the world’s poorest peoples: people near starvation are starved by it.

It is easy to forget that the use of fossil fuels has done more to benefit human kind than anything else since the invention of agriculture.

Most of us would not be here if it were not for the use of fossil fuels because all human activity is enabled by energy supply and limited by material science.

Energy supply enables the growing of crops, the making of tools and their use to mine for minerals, and to build, and to provide goods, and to provide services.

Material Science limits what can be done with the energy. A steel plough share is better than a wooden one. Ability to etch silica permits the making of acceptably reliable computers. And so on.

People die without energy and the ability to use it. They die because they lack food, or housing, or clothing to protect from the elements, or heating to survive cold, or cooling to survive heat, or medical provisions, or transport to move goods and services from where they are produced to where they are needed.

And people who lack energy are poor so they die from pollution, too.

For example, traffic pollution has been dramatically reduced by adoption of fossil fuels. On average each day in 1855 more than 50 tons of horse excrement was removed from only one street, Oxford Street in London. The mess, smell, insects and disease were awful everywhere. By 1900 every ceiling of every room in Britain had sticky paper hanging from it to catch the flies. Old buildings still have scrapers by their doors to remove some of the pollution from shoes before entering

Affluence reduces pollution. Rich people can afford sewers, toilets, clean drinking water and clean air. Poor people have more important things they must spend all they have to get. So, people with wealth can afford to reduce pollution but others cannot. Pollution in North America and Europe was greater in 1900 than in 2000 despite much larger populations in 2000. And the pollution now experienced every day by billions who do not have the wealth of Americans and Europeans includes cooking in a mud hut using wood and dung as fuel when they cannot afford a chimney.

The use of fossil fuels has provided that affluence for the developed world. The developing world needs the affluence provided by the development which is only possible at present by using fossil fuels.

We gained our wealth and our population by means of that use.

The energy supply increased immensely when the greater energy intensity in fossil fuels became available by use of the steam engine. Animal power, wind power and solar power were abandoned because the laws of physics do not allow them to provide as much energy as can be easily obtained from using fossil fuels.

The greater energy supply enabled more people to live and the human population exploded. Our population has now reached about 6.6 billion and it is still rising. All estimates are that the human population will peak at about 9 billion people near the middle of this century.

That additional more than 2 billion people in the next few decades needs additional energy supply to survive. The only methods to provide that additional energy supply at present are nuclear power and fossil fuels. And the use of nuclear power is limited because some activities are difficult to achieve by getting energy from the end of a wire.

If anybody doubts this then I tell them to ask a farmer what his production would be if he had to replace his tractor with a horse or a Sinclair C5.

So, holding the use of fossil fuels at its present level would kill at least 2 billion people, mostly children. And reducing the use of fossil fuels would kill more millions, possibly billions.

That is not an opinion. It is not a prediction. It is not a projection. It is a certain and undeniable fact. Holding the use of fossil fuels at their present levels would kill billions of people, mostly children. Reducing the use of fossil fuels would kill more millions or billions.

Improving energy efficiency will not solve that because it has been known since the nineteenth century that improved energy efficiency increases energy use: as many subsequent studies have confirmed (those who want to know why should Google Jevons Paradox).

But using fossil fuels emits CO2.

So, a deliberate significant reduction to CO2 emissions would pale into insignificance the combined activities of Ghengis Khan, Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot.

your understanding of economics is far less than your understanding of physics. Economics generally requires common sense to make sense. The assumption that all this revising of society to go for alternative energy sources and the like is going to be painless or of low pain is false. It’s going to be catastrophic. The simplest way to understand it is that alternative energy sources are alternatives because they are inferior and more costly. That cost reduces the resources available for other purposes – that means people are poorer, perhaps starving to death poorer. Investing in poor alternatives that cannot achieve competitive status on their own is what is called malinvestment – or simply – the squandering of scarce resources.

Government intervention is very problematic. Government produces nothing and consumes much. It is big enough to distort the economics so as to favor inferior and even defective choices.

Putting money into windfarms which not only cannot be built without subsidies, cannot even continue to operate without subsidies. Gov. controls by force and restriction. That energy production money could have been spent on efficient power creation such as nuclear power – which has been restricted beyond all reason and still offers economically feasible solutions were it actually possible to get permission to build one.

I agree entirely regarding the use of fossil fuels as an improved cleaner source of energy. Cities were disease ridden highly polluting entities prior to the advent of motor cars. There is room for improvement. For example, China needs to upgrade its use of scrubbers to reduce particulates. As their public becomes more affluent and able to affect public policy, they will come around. Power to the people only works if the people are powerful. Shear number does not count. Revolution can happen when just a few people have grown very powerful. Being angry does not count.

“…Lindzen can rely on the gullible to dutifully believe that basically every single scientific organization on the planet has been taken over by some small cadre of scientists that don’t represent their members!”

Prof Lindzen gives specific facts and examples showing what is happening to these organizations. Joel Shore’s response is to call everyone who disagrees with him ‘gullible’.

I was the CFO in a similar organization. I know how they work, and I have seen exactly what Lindzen describes. If Joel Shore doesn’t believe that one or two activists who know what they’re doing can hijack an organization, then labeling those who don’t agree with him as “gullible” is simply psychological projection on his part.

If the APS or any similar organization was truly interested in determining the views of its membership, it would be easy to design a secret ballot poll with all sides agreeing on the questions. The fact that the APS has never done that shows that their executive board has been hijacked by activists.

Prove me wrong, Joel. Convince the APS to set up an unbiased poll, as described above. You will find that you are wasting as much time as you waste here, trying to convert skeptical scientists into agenda-driven alarmists like yourself.

So, holding the use of fossil fuels at its present level would kill at least 2 billion people, mostly children. And reducing the use of fossil fuels would kill more millions, possibly billions.

That is not an opinion. It is not a prediction. It is not a projection. It is a certain and undeniable fact. Holding the use of fossil fuels at their present levels would kill billions of people, mostly children. Reducing the use of fossil fuels would kill more millions or billions.

…

So, a deliberate significant reduction to CO2 emissions would pale into insignificance the combined activities of Ghengis Khan, Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot.

So, remind me, who are the “alarmists” here? Are they the ones who have painstakingly studied the empirical data, used physical principles to build climate models, and delivered carefully-worded assessments of the science?

Or, are they the ones who ignore any sort of assessment or model, scientific or economic, and simply state that their grandiose predictions, in complete contradiction to any real assessments, are “certain and undeniable fact”?

Maybe to someone in the coal industry, reducing the use of fossil fuels (or sequestering CO2 from their use) seems like the end of the world. But, do you honestly believe that the only thing that separates are society from disaster and misery is the fortunate fact that we have the large enough amounts of fossil fuels (especially coal) that we do. If we did not, would not human ingenuity and the market system come up with other solutions for both energy sources and efficiency? And, if so, why do you feel that this won’t happen if we make the conscious choice not to use all the reserves that are there (at least not without sequestering the CO2 emissions)?

cba says:

The simplest way to understand it is that alternative energy sources are alternatives because they are inferior and more costly. That cost reduces the resources available for other purposes – that means people are poorer, perhaps starving to death poorer. Investing in poor alternatives that cannot achieve competitive status on their own is what is called malinvestment – or simply – the squandering of scarce resources.

The reason that alternative energy sources are alternatives also revolves around the fact that fossil fuels are heavily subsidized, both directly and indirectly (e.g., because of externalities). Also, they have not yet achieved economies to scale. Furthermore, markets are imperfect and, in fact, there are things that people can do for negative cost that they don’t do, especially in regards to energy efficiency improvements. In fact, here is an excerpt from a 2002 article interviewing the CEO of BP, John Browne:

In 1998, Browne publicly committed BP to cutting its carbon-dioxide emissions by 10 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2010, which was a 40 percent cut from business as usual and a target far more ambitious than the Kyoto Protocol itself…

When Browne stood up at Stanford this past spring, he was there to report hard numbers: BP had not just met its target — to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases by 10 percent below 1990 levels — it had exceeded it, done so eight years ahead of schedule and with no net economic cost. In fact, because of energy efficiency measures, the emissions reductions amounted to a net gain of $600 million. ”And we are not,” he told me later, ”an inefficient company.”

BP’s achievement complicates matters for Bush, who has pronounced the Kyoto Protocol ”fatally flawed” because regulating carbon-dioxide emissions ”does not make economic sense for America.”

That line of argument does not persuade Browne. ”If you say to people, ‘Do you want to develop the world and have a good living standard, or do you want a safer environment?’ people are terrified by the choice,” Browne said to me last spring. ”That is a failure of leadership.” Speaking of leadership, I asked, what did he think about Bush’s position on the issue — that caps on emissions would be too costly for American businesses? Browne paused, then answered, careful not to mention any names in particular: ”Well, it’s unfair to the world to say that none of this is possible when it is.”

Scientists have send letters to the UN, the IPCC, Congress, Senate, the President, Angela Merkel (who is a scientist herself), individual Senators and Members of Congress, you name it.

Recently. Joseph D’Aleo send a letter to John Kerry.

Joseph Published the response of this letter he received from John Kerry at icecap.us.

Reading the reply you find out that John Kerry has absolutely no interest in Joseph D’Aleo’s input or any other input for that matter. Kerry thinks he is smarter than a certified atmospheric scientist who says global warming is a total hoax.
John Kerry therefore is no longer a part of the solution.
He is part of the problem and the American Public has to deal with that.

All those in favor of the Climate Bill have to be voted out of office next time
and the American people must find a strategy to fight the current process.

Why?

Because people like Gore, Kerry and Obama are destroying America from within.

“When during the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the table at the United Nations saying, “We will bury you,” we did not take it seriously.
Instead, years later, we installed Mikhail Gorbachev in luxury quarters in San Francisco and gave him free reign to help mastermind America’s assimilation into the New World Order.

America would never lose a battle with a known enemy. But we now have enemies within and we let them take America on the long, slow path to suicide. They have conditioned us to forget our Constitution and accept assimilation into their New World Order”.

Their “new age religion” promoted by communists, environmentalists, incorporated into our laws and brainwashed into our people that is now destroying America from the inside, and the collaborators are everywhere, not only in America, but in Australia and Europe as well .

Like a vast ship, America is taking a long time to sink but each day it sinks a little further. The fearsome day awaits, when America, if not quickly recovered by Americans finding ways resisting this madness, will tilt its nose into the water to begin a rapid and final descent into oblivion … her many resources saved for whom?”

And read about an aluminum production plant in the USA that is closed down because…it no longer has the electrical power to continue it’s production.
Thanks to the Sierra Club and other environmental pressure groups and the current law.

Smokey: What Lindzen gives is an interpretation of events through his own biased lens. And, even if your proposed notion of how a scientific organization could be hijacked were correct, you then have to explain how this has happened simultaneously to almost every major scientific organization on the planet!

Most organizations are run as representative democracies. The whole point of the membership electing Board members and other officials is to have them make decisions rather than having the membership vote or be polled on every single decision. However, if a scientific organization’s board did something that the majority of members felt was wrong, then believe me, there would be an uproar a lot more serious than having a tiny fraction of members signing an open letter. (Nonetheless, APS was generous enough to this tiny fraction of members to offer to review their statement on climate change as these folks have suggested…although my own prediction is that these folks are unlikely to like the results of the review.)

I don’t have the time to wade through that right now to see if Lucia is correct or not in her claim. However, her claim is not that the atmospheric greenhouse effect violates the 2nd Law but instead that, in a particular simplified model, one has to be careful to choose the constants such that the 2nd Law is not violated, which is a very different claim.

[REPLY – Hmm. Offhand, I’d say Joel just disagrees with us skeptics. And, as he does so with considerably less venom than I find to be typical, that’s okay by me. He is somewhat embattled in this venue and I can respect someone who fights it out in what, in the main, must be considered “hostile territory” (despite the fact that we welcome both sides of the debate). The science is still in its infancy and there is a lot of room for error by any/all sides. ~ Evan]

There is no more reason to believe that global warming mitigation efforts will “destroy our economy”, than to believe in the potential for catastrophic AGW…. We can only reduce our CO2 footprint by reducing the use of fossil fuel energy, and almost everything we can do toward that goal will have economic benefit. Economic models that say otherwise are developed without knowledge of the real world of energy on the part of the modellers, and the ones that I have reviewed are based on 2 totally invalid assumptions.” Murray

Say What???

Real economic wealth is based on producing things – Right?
To produce something you take raw materials plus labor (energy) plus labor (human ingenuity) plus a place to manufacture the product (land)and come up with a final usable product. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam smith defined wealth as “the annual produce of the land and labor”..Wealth creation is combining materials, labor, land, and technology so there is an excess for trade to others, that is “a profit” in excess of the cost of production.”

In the modern world in addition to “materials, labor, land, and technology” we have to add taxes and the cost of regulations before we calculate the “excess for trade to others, that is “a profit” in excess of the cost of production.”

Cap and Trade adds more regulations and more taxes to the cost of production and therefore reduces the net “profit” If the cost of production rises above the cost others are willing to pay in trade for the product it will not be produced. This can happen because the product is unwanted at any cost, a cost benefit analysis by the consumer causes the consumer to decide the product is not worth the trade OR some one has a LOWER cost of production and can sell BELOW your cost of production.

Here in the USA we have seen the results of the third option. China has a LOWER cost of production and can sell BELOW USA cost of production as a result US production jobs have fallen below that of 1970.

So tell me how the #$# the USA is supposed to compete when we are saddled with MORE taxes, MORE regulations, government minimum wage, and American education is so bad today’s US students are unable to compete in the work place against foreigners?
“ Surveys of corporations consistently find that businesses are focused outside the U.S. to recruit necessary talent…”.

“For 10 years, William Schmidt, a statistics professor at Michigan State University, has looked at how U.S. students stack up against students in other countries in math and science. “In fourth-grade, we start out pretty well, near the top of the distribution among countries; by eighth-grade, we’re around average, and by 12th-grade, we’re at the bottom of the heap, outperforming only two countries, Cyprus and South Africa.”http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0804/0804textbooks.htm

So lets look at Energy:
Energy production from rivers got canned due to recent legislation that “protect our wild rivers” Ocean based Wind Turbines got NIMBYed by Ted Kennedy and the ultra wealthy who want to protect their views. Some poor farmer in CA who wanted to put in wind turbines found it took FIFTEEN YEARS to get through all the red tape before he was allowed to put the turbines up on his farm. “A significant cost in developing and building nuclear power plants is the numerous lawsuits which delay their construction. The US has not built a new nuclear fission power plant in over 30 years because of this.” Nuclear fusion is still in the research stages.

That leaves Solar panels so lets consider converting all USA electrical power (does not include transportation) to solar panel generated power:

Solar energy comes in at a density of little more than 1 kW m^2 The solar panel conversion rate is 17.7% at best or 10% for a 24 hr period if we are very generous. Thats 2,577,937,315,000 m2 which is 2,577,937 sq kilometers The USA land accounts for 9,161,923 square kilometers so that means we need to cover more than one quarter of the surface of the USA with solar panels. Does that mean we cut down all the forests on government land and convert to solar panels??? Get rid of our farms and put in solar panels instead???

If you want alternate power get rid of the blasted regulations. I would love to put in some windmills and a two level double pond generating system and get off the blasted grid. However the county planning board and the EPA makes that almost impossible. After my last couple of go rounds with the local planning board I do not even want to bother asking and I certainly do not want to draw the “loving” attentions of the EPA.

As Back2Bat said
I realize that the world is in the grip of insane Keynesian economic theory. Here is a rule of thumb for you:

1. Government is force.
2. Good ideas do not have to be forced on others.
3. Bad ideas should not be forced on others
4. Liberty is necessary for the difference between good ideas and bad ideas to be revealed.”

But he forgot to mention the economics departments have been under the thumb of the central bankers here in the USA since 1910. So the economic theories are skewed. http://www.bigeye.com/griffin.htm

The guy who made up your survey, Robert Lichter, is on the board of the Dreyfus Foundation, which has given over $10 million in grants to study the climate. Does anyone honestly believe that with so much money available, the recipients will come back and say, “Hey, it turns out the climate is fine. Go spend your grant money elsewhere.”?

No. That goes against human nature. Instead, this is the kind of results the Dreyfus Foundation buys: click

So excuse me if I am highly skeptical of any claim of impartiality in that year-and-a-half old survey cited. Any organization with an unstated AGW agenda would come up with the vague polling questions that Lichter put together.

As I said above, if the APS or any similar organization was truly interested in determining the views of its membership, it would be easy to design a secret ballot poll with all sides agreeing on the questions. The fact that the APS has never done that shows that their executive board has been hijacked by activists.

Push-polling takes place constantly. It is simply propaganda, purchased by individuals and organizations with an unspoken agenda. It makes/creates sound bites. But the public never sees the results when the purchaser doesn’t get the answers they wanted. They simply re-word the questions and buy another poll.

In the case of AGW opinions, the only legitimate poll is one in which both sides of the issue agree on the specific wording of the poll questions.

If you have the results of a poll in which the AGW believers and the AGW skeptics have all agreed on the language of the poll questions, then post it. Otherwise, stop trying to spoon feed us your AGW propaganda. People here can tell what you’re up to.

Smokey: You’ve sure gotten real good at whining! The fact is that the poll was conducted by Harris Interactive, a very respected polling firm. It was done for Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University, which those on the Left note, is an operation of the conservative Center for Media and Public Affairs. “Media Transparency lists startup funding for STATS as having come from conservative funders including the John M. Olin Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the William H. Donner Foundation. Other funders include Richard Mellon Scaife’s Carthage Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation and the Castle Rock Foundation” ( http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Statistical_Assessment_Service )

If anything, it is those of us concerned about AGW who should be skeptical of the poll. (And, indeed, as I have noted past times that I brought it up, their method of selecting their random sample of scientists probably diluted the “climate scientists” that they say it represents the views of with non-climate scientists like forecast meteorologists who tend to have more skeptical views on AGW than the climate scientists themselves.

I note that you have consistently avoided answering my question about conducting an honest poll. Show us a poll that has questions that have been agreed to by both sides — as opposed to polls you cite, which are bought and paid for by people with an AGW agenda [someone pays good money for those polls; they don’t just fall from the sky].

If you fail to show us an honest poll, then you’re simply defending AGW polling propaganda. What kind of fool would swallow the ridiculous claim that 97.4% of poll respondents all believe that there is significant AGW occurring?? Certainly not the scientific skeptics who visit this site. And not the rank-and-file APS members, either.

That poll, which you’ve mentioned several times in the past, has zero credibility: 97.4% of folks polled wouldn’t agree that today is Tuesday. Bogus propaganda like that is all the AGW true believers have left; they certainly don’t have real world data that backs their alarming scare stories. Push polls and GIGO computer models,Ri-i-i-i-ght. What’s next for AGW true believers? Astrology? Scientology? Phrenology?

And Dr Roy Spencer says pretty much the same thing that Prof Richard Lindzen and other, actually credible climate scientists are saying. Spencer and Lindzen are internationally esteemed as two of the top climatologists in their field [BTW, what’s your field? Do you work put in your time at a gov’t agency, or a company or school that takes taxpayer money? It’s amazing the number of really long posts you make here and at the other blogs you comment at, all throughout the work week. The time stamps are interesting. Is it the policy of your employer to let you sit down and endlessly argue on the internet all day? Inquiring minds — and retired posters — want to know.]

Your derogatory comments about Dr Lindzen, who chairs the Atmospheric Sciences department at MIT, is only a reflection on you. And claiming that I’m ‘whining’ when I’m asking you to show us an honest poll is due to the psychological projection typical of believers in runaway global warming and similar AGW climate catastrophe nonsense.

So you go on believing that 97.4% of scientists agree that significant AGW is happening. If you believe that number, you’ll believe anything.

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels,
do you think that mean global temperatures
have generally risen, fallen, or
remained relatively constant?

2. Do you think human activity is a significant
contributing factor in changing
mean global temperatures?

The Answer

Results show that overall, 90% of participants
answered “risen” to question 1
and 82% answered yes to question 2. In
general, as the level of active research
and specialization in climate science
increases, so does agreement with the two
primary questions. In our survey,
the most specialized and knowledgeable
respondents (with regard to climate
change) are those who listed climate science
as their area of expertise and who
also have published more than 50% of
their recent peer-reviewed papers on the
subject of climate change. Of these specialists,
96.2% answered “risen” to question 1
and 97.4% answered yes to question
2.

I gave a clear, factual and reasoned explanation of why human population is constrained by energy supply.

I stated the facts that
(a) human population is increasing from its present total of ~6.6 billion, and
(b) the increase requires additional energy supply for the additional population to survive.

I reported the fact that all predictions are for human population to peak around the middle of this century. And I cited a low estimate for that peak of 9 billion (high estimates are up to 13 billion).

You go right ahead and believe in your push polls. Scientific skeptics will continue to ask for solid, empirical evidence showing that the “A” in catastrophic AGW is anything other than an alarming fairy tale, endlessly repeated in order to generate ever more $Billions in grant money. The fact that such evidence is not forthcoming isn’t important to them; money and control are what is important.

That poll Joel Shore was referring to was done well before a British judge ruled that Al Gore’s movie was based on a pack of lies. Attitudes are changing fast, and an old poll like that, as ridiculous as it was at the time, does not have much to do with today’s rapidly growing scientific skepticism regarding the claims of runaway, catastrophic AGW.

I note that no alarmist will take my challenge to produce a poll with questions and language that was mutually agreed to between scientific skeptics and AGW believers. I know something about polls. My organization bought polls for advertising purposes. Without the input of both sides, these polls are nothing but propaganda to support an agenda.

But go ahead and believe in them if you like. Believe that practically 100% of respondents all think and answer alike. And ignore contrary opinions like the OISM Petition, with tens of thousands of signers who directly contradict those push poll results with this clear statement:

“The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.” [my emphasis]

Well over thirty thousand U.S. scientists have already signed that statement. They had to download it and print it out, then sign it, apply postage, and mail it in — no emails allowed. And only those with a degree in the physical sciences are accepted. They have to go to some effort to make their views known.

The fact that the alarmist contingent is now reduced to citing ginned-up push polls of 500 respondents in order to support their beliefs should tell folks all they need to know about the lack of any credible CAGW evidence.

That poll Joel Shore was referring to was done well before a British judge ruled that Al Gore’s movie was based on a pack of lies. Attitudes are changing fast, and an old poll like that, as ridiculous as it was at the time, does not have much to do with today’s rapidly growing scientific skepticism regarding the claims of runaway, catastrophic AGW.

What is clear from this description is that you are living in a fantasy world, immersed in an echo chamber and are, frankly, quite out-of-touch with what the scientific community is actually saying, hearing, or listening to.

I note that no alarmist will take my challenge to produce a poll with questions and language that was mutually agreed to between scientific skeptics and AGW believers.

What did Rumsfeld say, something like, “You go to war with the army that you have, not the one you’d like to have”? One could always imagine the ideal poll but the fact is that we have polls that are available and none of us is personally equipped to actually organize and conduct a poll of this sort. What you don’t seem to comprehend is the weight of the accumulated evidence. First, one has all the scientific organizations making their statements…So, you have to posit that all those scientific organizations have been hijacked. Not ridiculous for one or two organizations but pretty far-fetched when it gets to be pretty much all of them! Your argument is like saying that flipping a coin 100 times and getting all heads doesn’t provide strong evidence that the coin is not fair because it is actually quite likely that a fair coin would give you heads on a single flip.

Then you have polls…So maybe one particular poll isn’t perfect but you have several and they back up what we already know from the statements by the scientific organizations and the fact that there has been no organization whose membership has revolted and actually elected “skeptics” to better represent their views. In fact, the only revolt that I know of that has resulted in a significant change of a climate change statement was when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (a group whose members have a significant economic incentive to be “skeptical”) had enough of their members complain about their “skeptical” statement being an embarrassment and well out of the scientific mainstream that they changed it to be basically non-committal.

But go ahead and believe in them if you like. Believe that practically 100% of respondents all think and answer alike. And ignore contrary opinions like the OISM Petition, with tens of thousands of signers who directly contradict those push poll results with this clear statement: …

Well over thirty thousand U.S. scientists have already signed that statement. They had to download it and print it out, then sign it, apply postage, and mail it in — no emails allowed. And only those with a degree in the physical sciences are accepted. They have to go to some effort to make their views known.

That is precious! You label a poll conducted by a reputable polling organization at the behest of an organization who has gotten considerable funding from Right Wing organizations like Scaife as a “push poll” because it didn’t sufficiently bias the poll to get the result you wanted, and then you cite the Oregon Petition? Are you serious?!? It’s beyond being a “push poll”…It isn’t a poll at all. It is like a old Soviet-style election where the only vote you can give is a “Yes” vote (after being bombarded with propaganda) and then they tell you how many voted “Yes”. And, your naive description of how it worked is a little off-base. Let me quote physicist Robert Park’s more accurate description of how signatures were solicited ( http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN03/wn080803.html ):

One of the purported abuses cited in the minority staff report involved the insertion into an EPA report of a reference to a paper by Soon and Baliunas that denies global warming (WN 1 Aug 03). To appreciate its significance, we need to go back to March of 1998. We all got a petition card in the mail urging the government to reject the Kyoto accord (WN 13 Mar 98). The cover letter was signed by “Frederick Seitz, Past President, National Academy of Sciences.” Enclosed was what seemed to be a reprint of a journal article, in the style and font of Proceedings of the NAS. But it had not been published in PNAS, or anywhere else. The reprint was a fake. Two of the four authors of this non- article were Soon and Baliunas. The other authors, both named Robinson, were from the tiny Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in Cave Junction, OR. The article claimed that the environmental effects of increased CO2 are all beneficial. There was also a copy of Wall Street Journal op-ed by the Robinsons (father and son) that described increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere as “a wonderful and unexpected gift of the industrial revolution.” There was no indication of who had paid for the mailing. It was a dark episode in the annals of scientific discourse.

I gave a clear, factual and reasoned explanation of why human population is constrained by energy supply.

If you believe this is the case, then the logical thing to do is to work to help constrain the human population growth through family planning rather than saying that we should significantly degrade the environment of the planet in order to accommodate such unconstrained population growth. If we don’t humanely constrain the population (and our effect on the environment) then the environment will do it for us…and not so humanely.

Even if we take your premises (which I don’t necessarily as I have discussed above), this conclusion does not follow at all unless you believe that the ONLY way to get sufficient energy supply is through fossil fuels. There are both other sources of energy and other ways to more efficiently use energy. As John Browne says:

If you say to people, ‘Do you want to develop the world and have a good living standard, or do you want a safer environment?’ people are terrified by the choice,” Browne said to me last spring. ”That is a failure of leadership.”

Heck, even ExxonMobil is pretty much singing the tune these days of reducing greenhouse gas emissions: http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/energy_climate_views.aspx Many of the posters on this site, like yourself, are so far out in Right Field that ExxonMobil looks like an organization of “socialist pinko radical tree-hugging environmental extremists” by comparison!

So, Joel, based on the information I gave earlier, which seems to be accepted by everyone here including you, have you managed to calculate yet the percentage of APS memebership that has signed the present and still effective APS statement on AGW?

In this thread you are advocating methods 1 and 2. But only method 3 has been demonstrated to work, and methods 1 and 2 have never succeeded.

You are arguing that deprivation of energy should be the method used to “constrain the population”. And you attempt to pretend this can be done “humanely” by advocating “birth control”. The hypocrisy of that pretence compounds the evil of your argument.

The methods you advocate have been tried in the past; e.g.
eugenics in many places,
gas chambers in Nazi-occupied Europe,
a ‘one-child policy’ in China,
‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia,
etc.
These methods kill people but they have never managed to halt population growth. And the reason for their failure is known.

Human population expands to enable the old to be supported by the young.
Poor peoples need as many young as possible for that support.
Rich people can be supported by their resources other than their offspring and, therefore, the effect of many children is a net cost for them.

So, as nations develop they gain sufficient affluence that their birth rates drop. Developed countries have achieved such affluence that they are failing to replenish their populations; indeed, they are needing to import people to sustain their economies.

But you assert that the world’s poor should be kept poor and be culled by starving them of the energy supply they need to survive. And you promote this genocide (of an unprecedented magnitude) as being for the benefit of “the” environment.

People are more important than your mythical notion of “the” environment.

Since you assert that we need to “constrain the population” to support “the” environment, I point out that there is a simple way for you to reduce human population by one. You could remove yourself from existence: this would enable a poor child in the Third World to survive and s/he would have a smaller ‘carbon footprint’ than you so there would be net benefit to “the” environment.

However, we both know you will not do that because advocates of genocide always choose to kill other people.

Richard

Reply: Before Joel Screams bloody murder! Where are the moderators? I would like to note that I thought long and hard on this and decided it should stand as is. ~ charles the moderator

I see that Joel Shore is still attempting to co-opt the skeptics’ term “echo chamber”, which has been used consistently to refer to blogs like realclimate, which censors posts that contradict their CO2=CAGW belief system.

WUWT does not censor, therefore WUWT is not an echo chamber. QED.

Echo chamber blogs like realclimate are censoring blogs, where their red faced, spittle flecked arm-wavers constantly tell each other the same debunked, wacky theories over and over. Thus, the ‘echo chamber.’ Pretty soon they convince each other to become true believers, because all they hear is the same globaloney from other folks who believe, without any credible evidence, that a tiny trace gas is going to cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe.

Then a few of them come over here to try and convert scientific skeptics to their beliefs — but skeptics are simply asking for any solid evidence for their belief that CO2 will cause catastrophic AGW. Skeptics question; that’s their job [and every honest scientist is a true skeptic]. Of course, since there is no empirical evidence to back up CAGW, that explains the lack of converts to the alarmists’ dwindling camp of true believers.

But it’s very nice that Joel acknowledges our original thinking here by trying to shift the meaning of ‘echo chamber’. George Orwell would understand. Too bad Joel failed the challenge to show us an honest poll, though. Without an honest poll where both sides agree on the wording of the questions, we’ll just have to go with the OISM Petition statement signed by 30,000+ scientists: “There is no convincing scientific evidence” of CAGW. None.

Without any verifiable evidence, it’s obvious that the alarmist arm-wavers are trying to sell everyone a pig in a poke. Joel needs to go back to his echo chamber and tell ’em we’re not buying. And the general public is beginning to see their scam, too.

If a poll of scientists on CAWG is conducted, it should include a half-dozen fairly simple knowledge-testing questions so that the degree of belief / disbelief in CAWG can be correlated with the degree of knowledge / ignorance of the topic.

I do indeed stand corrected, thank you. However I find it implausible that Judge Burton’s ruling on the failed legal action would have swayed the opinion of many pollees against the movie, as he was of the opinion that it is plainly, as witnessed by the fact that it received an Oscar this year for best documentary film, a powerful, dramatically presented and highly professionally produced film … It is substantially founded upon scientific research and fact, and I have no doubt that Dr Stott, the Defendant’s expert, is right when he says that:”Al Gore’s presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate.”

Joel is right to find the dismissing of the ‘inconvenient’ results of professionally-produced polls followed by the citing of the Oregon Petition pretty hilarious. They may have tightened things up recently, however in 2001 Scientific Americantook a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition—one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages

That’s right – 10% of the qualified signatories had no knowledge of how their names got on there! Currently more than half of the signatories are primarily engineers rather than scientists, then there are the medical doctors, chiropractors, vetinarians etc etc. Of the tens of millions who apparently could sign the thing, 31,000 (over a decade) is a totally unpersuasive drop in the ocean. ‘Skeptic’ magazine concluded through his Global Warming Petition Project, Arthur Robinson has solicited the opinions of the wrong group of people in the wrong way and drawn the wrong conclusions about any possible consensus among relevant and qualified scientists regarding the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. His petition is unqualified to deliver answers about a consensus in which the public is interested. He has a right to conduct any kind of petition drive he wishes, but he is not ethically entitled to misrepresent his petition as a fair reflection of relevant scientific opinion.” Now THAT is what I call skepticism.

Polls are one method of divining scientific opinion, but a literature review is better.

The sample : ‘abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords “climate change”‘

The analysis : ‘The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position’

The result : ‘75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.’

Charles, you can snip me to death if you wish but Richard says it all. Congratulations on a good call on an EXCELLENT comment!

By my count, the term “alarmist” has been used 13 times in this thread (not counting by me or someone quoting me) and yet when Richard Courtney says something that is not only alarmist, but has absolutely no scientific support whatsoever, and is moreover slanderous (accusing me…and presumably anybody who supports any constraints whatsoever on his favorite energy sources, including the CEO of BP…of being an “advocate of genocide”), the only comment from the “peanut gallery” is one that cheers him on!?! That seems pretty pathetic to me.

Where are the people here who really object to alarmism, fear-mongering, and slander as opposed to those objecting to well-founded science that goes against their own preconceptions and prejudices?

REPLY: Joel when I see you on another forum defending against the hateful and foul labels that have been applied to me personally and to this forum, I’ll take your concerns about the mild word “alarmist” seriously. – Anthony Watts

In this thread you are advocating methods 1 and 2. But only method 3 has been demonstrated to work, and methods 1 and 2 have never succeeded.

You are arguing that deprivation of energy should be the method used to “constrain the population”. And you attempt to pretend this can be done “humanely” by advocating “birth control”. The hypocrisy of that pretence compounds the evil of your argument.

No. I am arguing that family planning and other educational and humanitarian means should be used to help control population growth. and, I am arguing that although energy is important, it is not so important that we should sacrifice our environment and endanger the welfare of both human civilization and many ecosystems in order to keep certain forms of it artificially cheap.

And, at present, the only sources of abundant energy supply are fossil fuels and nuclear power.

That is because of the fact that fossil fuels have been heavily subsidized both directly and indirectly (by their costs not being internalized) has not allowed the proper market incentives to reward efficiency and other forms of energy. (And, I am not against nuclear, although I don’t think it should be subsidized, but rather should be allowed to compete on a level playing field where fossil fuels are priced to more closely reflect their real costs.)

But you assert that the world’s poor should be kept poor and be culled by starving them of the energy supply they need to survive.

No. Why don’t you go and argue with Smokey who claims this is all a sinister plot by China and other developing nations to equalize the world’s wealth? Maybe you two can get together and decide if I am advocating further impoverishment of the world’s poor or wealth transfer from the rich to the poor. Or maybe, you can agree to use one argument on even days and the other on odd days.

And you promote this genocide (of an unprecedented magnitude) as being for the benefit of “the” environment.

People are more important than your mythical notion of “the” environment.

Perhaps this comes as news to you but the “environment” is not a mythical notion and people live in the environment and are very dependent on the benefits that it provides.

However, we both know you will not do that because advocates of genocide always choose to kill other people.

Is this the latest strategy of the coal industry that you are a part of ( http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_S._Courtney ), to accuse those who advocate for any constraints on CO2 as advocates of genocide? Well, you guys have certainly chosen a winning strategy with that one! I guess there is a long history of industries lobbying to try to claim their own self-interest to be the common good, but this is a bit over-the-top even by those standards!

Do you really want to go there? Can you imagine what the real costs of a windfarm are if you take into account mining, manufacturing, installation, transportation, electrical distribution requirements, land contamination, view spoilage, gearbox upkeep, wildlife massacres, standby generation capacity, and much more I’m sure I’m forgetting.

“the only comment from the “peanut gallery” is one that cheers him on!?! “ Joel

When this “peanut” turns out to be right won’t that be something? My opinion is based on everything from Al Gores’s obesity to the statistical impossibility of this Universe plus a lot I learned on this site. If I am wrong about CO2 then I am wrong about everything. I find that statistically impossible.

My thanks to Anthony and his gang though. Without this site, I would not have firmly made up my mind.

REPLY: Joel when I see you on another forum defending against the hateful and foul labels that have been applied to me personally and to this forum, I’ll take your concerns about the mild word “alarmist” seriously. – Anthony Watts

Anthony, what I was objecting to was being labeled by Richard Courtney as an “advocate of genocide” and being told that I advocate such methods as “gas chambers in Nazi-occupied Europe” and “‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia”. Given that some of my own relatives, as close as great aunts and uncles, were killed in the Holocaust, I think my response has been relatively restrained considering the circumstances.

My point about the word “alarmist” is simply that people seem to have a double standard where carefully-sourced statements based on painstaking scientific research are dubbed “alarmist” while wild claims involving the “genocide” of 2 billion people that are based on no research whatsoever are not even objected to. Believe me, if I was personally offended about being called “alarmist” on a daily basis, I would have left this site long long ago.

Hateful speech and boorishness are of course to be universally condemned, however it sets an interesting precedent if one must first seek out and challenge every example of such elsewhere in order to avoid being the recipient of such here. No?

And if one must first ‘clean up’ the internet how about raising standards of honesty while we’re about it? A modest suggestion: before we take Mr Courtney seriously we should perhaps ask him to correct the various open letters and petitions where he signs himself Dr Richard Courtney, or Richard Courtney PhD. For example here or here . After all he has never actually been awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

It could of course, be a completely different Richard Courtney. Perhaps the man himself would take this opportunity to clear this up, is he the Dr Richard Courtney in this petition and open letter? Does he in fact, hold a Doctorate?

Or do we conclude that overstating one’s credentials in an attempt to influence public opinion is now acceptable?

Hmm – people are asking for a poll of APS members. Here’s a suggestion – how about asking all the APS members who are following this thread on WUWT? Lurkers and posters, if you’re an APS member, what’s your view? Post with your name so those of us who are members can verify you’re listed in the online directory.

For the record, as a life APS member I fully support the current statement of the APS council, as it accurately mirrors the conclusions of the 2007 IPCC report.

‘Richard avoids confusion about him in his scientific and religious activities by rarely citing his
academic achievements, but his material science qualifications include a DipPhil (Cambridge), a
BA (Open) and a Diploma (Bath).’

2. Have you, in fact, been awarded the academic degree of Doctor of Philosphy? If so, what was the title of your thesis and what was the awarding body?

Quite happy to engage with your wider arguments once we’ve cleared up this little confusion. I am quite certain that you are not somebody who would devalue the currency of academic qualifications by claimimg a degree which you had not actually earned, in fact I would refuse to engage to debate with such a charlatan, so I look forward to your clearing this little matter up.

Don’t you think questions like yours should apply equally to everyone?

No I do not. In general, arguments should be assessed on their merits, regardless of whom is advancing them, with the caveat that those from people with demonstrably relevant experience and expertise deserve special consideration, Joel’s workplace is an irrelavance.

Online, the right to anonymity is useful and occassionally necessary; there was a poster on Climate Audit [lorax] recently presenting some arguments unpopular with the McIntyre fanboys. One of them figured out his offline identity and apparently made some threatening remarks ….

But I fear Richard has broken cover. He has endorsed various [coal industry friendly] position statements, and in doing so has represented himself as a ‘Dr; and a ‘PhD’, implying that he has undertaken the original research required to earn the award of this degree.

All I want to know is the title of his PhD thesis, and the name of the awarding body. Information that anyone genuinely prefixing their name with ‘Dr’ or suffixing it with ‘PhD’ would be willing and able to furnish with a minimum of fuss.

Unless, of course, the awarding of the degree never happened. And why on Earth would I spend my precious time arguing with a fantasist?

So to be fair, I think Joel needs to answer first, since he was asked first.

The question that Phil Clarke raised with Richard Courtney is whether he has correctly presented his academic credentials.

Since I have never presented to you where I work, there is no way that I could have incorrectly presented them. And, my credentials as a physicist are not hard to find through google and indeed a few people have said that they have googled me and seen some of the papers that I’ve published and what-not.

I wish that Joel Shore, Richard Courtney and Phil Clarke would just cool down a bit.

Mr. Courtney, your “culling” point, and later expansion of it, were ridiculous; in fact I found them as offensive as Hansen’s “death train” remarks. Do you really think that the posters you spar with are on par with history’s sociopaths and megalomaniacs?

Mr. Clarke, get off the “who is Richard Courtney” line. You won’t discuss things with someone who is not your equal. We get it. If his credentials are more important than his arguments, then maybe you should just ignore him or go away.

Mr. Shore, can you post a comment without invoking “big oil”, “evil coal” or nefarious “right wing” institutes? Its another tired allusion to the “follow the money” distraction, and we all know the real money is on the green side anyways.

Mr. Shore, can you post a comment without invoking “big oil”, “evil coal” or nefarious “right wing” institutes? Its another tired allusion to the “follow the money” distraction, and we all know the real money is on the green side anyways.

In fact, if you look at my posts in this thread, you will see:

(1) None of them mentioned “Big Oil”. And, in fact, the only real thing that I can currently say about Big Oil is that even the most recalcitrant of the oil companies, ExxonMobil, now at least publicly accepts the science and, in fact, touts the fact that two of its scientists were involved in the IPCC reports that led to the Nobel Peace Prize ( http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/energy_climate_views.aspx ).

(2) I only mentioned the coal industry after Richard Courtney, who is factually from that industry, embarked on his despicable campaign of labeling myself and anyone who supports any regulations regarding CO2 emissions as “advocates of genocide”.

(3) I only mentioned the “right wing” stuff in response to the lame claim by Smokey that STATS was somehow a left-wing organization who had launched a “push poll”. He was the one who was trying to distract us with ad hominem attacks because he didn’t like the poll results. I was merely pointing out that it was not because of their apparent leanings, but despite their apparent leanings, that the STATS poll produced the results that it did.

I appreciate you condemning Richard Courtney for what he has said in this thread but I think your similar condemnations of Phil Clarke and myself is at best like treating murder and jaywalking as similar crimes.

Mr. Clarke, get off the “who is Richard Courtney” line. You won’t discuss things with someone who is not your equal. We get it. If his credentials are more important than his arguments, then maybe you should just ignore him or go away.

I think this is an extreme misrepresentation of what Phil Clarke has been after. The question is not whether Courtney’s credentials are sufficient to be his “equal”. Rather, the question is whether Courtney has misrepresented his credentials in these petitions…i.e., it is an issue of honesty and integrity. I personally don’t know what the answer is because the very same person who labeled me an “advocate of genocide” somehow finds it to be “lies and smears” when Phil Clarke asks him about this and refuses to just answer the question.

My apologies if I misrepresented what you said. I had quickly read through all the threads and then wrote essentially from memory. I missed Mr. Courtney’s ridiculous “advocate” comment; you clearly were advocating education, not genocide. He should apologize. As for whether he is a “Dr.” or not, he should own up. Well Mr. Courtney, are you in fact you?

I dismiss his “starvation” and “culling” points as strawman arguments. Having said that, I think that “Provision of affluence” is bang on. I don’t see how trying to educate people in the third world to reduce their numbers can be effective when it runs counter to their culture (i.e. family size, survival of the elderly, family name, etc.), government indifference, 1st world envy/contempt, fear of change, religious dictates and other issues that I certainly have missed. These issues are immediate and visceral, and impossible to compare to some ill-defined future global crisis that people neither understand nor consider important. Its a hard sell and there are no other options before us except coercion or fiat. If they do not buy what we are selling, CO2 will continue to rise.

I was just annoyed with the escalating invective of the three posters’ intertwined posts. For the record, there is no Dr. before my name.

I have been wrongly accused of using “invective” and, since nobody has corrected that accusation, I shall use some invective.

I think the genocidal louts publishing here are a disgrace to the human race.

There, that is an honest statement of my view and it is “invective”.
Satisfied now?

I directly addressed the hypocrisy of Joel Shore’s claim that effects of culling the poor by means of energy deprivation could be overcome by “education and birth control” when I explained why China’s ‘One-Child’ policy had failed. So, oakgeo I do not need to “apologise” for anything.

Knowing they have lost the argument, the genocidal louts are now trying to defame me because I explained what their disingenuous claims really mean for the most disadvantaged in the world.

The genocidal louts are shouting about my “credentials” because they know their assertions have been demonstrated to be evil, and they are attempting to deflect attention away from that. But my “credentials” have no relevance of any kind to this. I merely pointed out facts of the repercussions of constraining the use of fossil fuels. And I made no statements concerning my “credentials”. Claims concerning my “credentials” are a ‘red herring’.

I have learned the hard way – and repeatedly – how these people operate. They make a false assertion about a person. If that assertion is refuted then they make another false assertion. But each false assertion gives some on-lookers the idea that ‘there is no smoke without fire’.

So, I refuse to defend myself against these false attacks that have no relevance of any kind to the truth of what I have written here. However, there may be some here who want to know something about me, and I am willing to point them to information that is in the public domain on pages 25 and 26 of the item athttp://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtney_2006_lecture.pdf
The paragraphs on page 26 (prior to my full contact details) explain why I care to oppose evil.

That is my final word in reply to the personal abuse of me.

And the item at the url explains why windpower is not a useful alternative to use of nuclear power and fossil fuels for power generation.

It is often said that the epitome of “chutzpah” is the boy who kills both his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. Your complaints here of “personal abuse” has made that example of chutzpah look mild by comparison.

REPLY: OK that’s an end to this interpersonal argument – for both of you – thread closed – Anthony